Self-defence courses tailored for the blind

Steps are being taken in the United Kingdom to provide people who are blind or have low vision with self-defence skills.

Tim Stirling, 28, could have used such skills on a recent train ride. A passenger had stepped on his guide dog’s tail and when he asked the man and his friends to be more careful, they responded badly.

“He was intoxicated and abusive,” Stirling told the BBC. “He said I was too young to have a guide dog and that one of his relatives needed it more than me.

“Then he hit me. A shove in my upper arm and my back. It was almost like he was goading me to respond … I think he wanted to justify what he was doing by getting me to react.

“I could only really go on words. When I thought he was going to lay into me, I grabbed my friend and ran off the train quickly.”

Stirling and his friend escaped physical injury but he says he felt much more vulnerable after the incident, which is far from unique. The British Guide Dogs Association reports a marked increase in attacks on guide animals. It wants the U.K. government to consider these attacks as serious as those on a human.

“The thing with being partially sighted is you don’t feel like you’re blind. It’s only when this happened. I had a sense of how much I couldn’t see, really. Not being able to successfully relate to the person in a visual sense, not knowing where others were and not knowing what stop I was at.”

As a result of such encounters, more low-vision Britons are taking up self-defence including a course developed specifically for them by ju-jitsu teacher Stephen Nicholls. Called 1Touch, it’s designed to work at a practical ‘street’ level.

“You don’t want to do sport,” Nicholls says. “You want to do something which has an edge of reality to it.”

He developed the approach after studying attacks on the blind. He learned that most encounters start when the attacker sees his victim’s lack of conventional body language and eye contact as a sign of vulnerability. So he came up with techniques and strategies to quickly put the attacker at an unexpected disadvantage. For example, grabbing the aggressor’s hand and thumb and twisting such a way as to cause sudden and extreme pain (a video demonstration can be viewed at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18548681).

There was more to the project than simply adapting an existing regime. Nicolls says even the teaching methods had to be to be approached differently.

It’s early days, so there aren’t a lot of graduates yet but one – 40-something Andrew Jones of London – is a convert.

“It gives you a sense of awareness, confidence, awareness of the space around you,” Jones says. “If someone approaches you in a threatening way, you don’t have to just lie on the floor and roll over, you can stand up for yourself. The fact you walk tall and confident makes you less of a target to start with.”